Simulation and Evaluation of ICU Management Policies

Abstract

The intensive care unit is one of the bottleneck resources in the hospital, due to the fact that the demand grows much faster than the capacity. The pressure on intensive care unit managers to use resources efficiently and effectively increases. Therefore, optimal management policies are required. In this work, we evaluate eleven commonly referred policies from the literature and compare their performance by nine key performance indicators in different perspectives, such as utilization, patient health status, and profit of the hospital. The 30 most frequently occurring patient paths, based on the practical dataset of more than 75,000 patient records from a German teaching hospital, are simulated. According to our results, increasing the capacity and treating the patients in well-equipped intermediate care units performed better in the medical perspective, while the early discharge policy performs well when the capacity is limited. Furthermore, the COVID-19 scenario could be integrated into the model.